GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs Radeon HD 4850 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, which comes with clock speeds of 625 MHz on the GPU, and 993 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 800(160x5) SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4850 2GB		110 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		145 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (32%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTS 250 1GB should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		63552 MB/sec
	Difference: 6848 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB should be quite a bit (about 89%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		25000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22232 (89%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB should be a small bit (about 18%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 4850 2GB, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		11808 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4850 2GB		10000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1808 (18%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.